Cooking, Picasa, Rip-Offs, Raiding the Piggy-Bank.

June 16^th Both of us were confined to barracks today, me because the boss gave me orders; and Huan because today’s choral session was cancelled due to the rain. The sluice gates on the first bridge were opened to release the flow from the mountain, not the one where we get our water from but the one that is used for white water rafting. The old sluice gates are of no effect whatsoever and before long the water was deep in front of our house again. Two photos from today, the first is a view of the clouds through the trees, where’s that bigger zoom when you need it, the second one shows that the embankment they built to keep the water away from the construction area didn’t really work.

For the rest of the day Huan did her best impression of Hyacinth Bucket again and tortured my ears non stop. I started binge watching “Lewis” because I couldn’t find any more “Saint” episodes. In the evening chef Bob was once more on duty and today I took us for a normal English style dinner, pork fillets, mashed potatoes and peas. The peas were out of a tin but I tarted them up with fried mushrooms, garlic and green onions then reheated them in the microwave with a knob of butter. When you only have one hotplate you have to find other ways! Various kinds of sauce and mustard were on hand but we didn’t need them.

June 17^th My ‘curfew’ was supposed to end today, but when we got up I was a little worried that it wouldn’t. The rain was still with us; in fact it had been raining nearly all night. Luck was on my side though because we had to go out, lottery tickets needed buying for today and tomorrow. Unlike the lottery in the UK, you can only buy for the next one here, not for more than one in advance. Today is “Sports Lottery” day and tomorrow is “Welfare Lottery” day, hence the purchasing of two tickets. We kept an eye on the weather and set off out when we thought that the rain had eased off. It had, but before too long it came back again. Never mind, Huan had her trusty brolly and I didn’t get too wet.

The only photos we took were camera selfies with me holding the camera at arm’s length in my left hand. Some turned out OK. I thought that today I would show you a couple of examples of what you can do, as an amateur photographer, with no camera or post processing skills at all. This first one is “Duotone”, using only two colours.

The second is “Sepia” and “Soft Focus”.

And the last is “Saturation”; don’t you just love our blue eyes?

So how can a dummy like me turn out different types of photos like this? Those of you who have long memories may remember a photo management program produced by Google and called “Picasa”. It has been discontinued which means there is no longer any support for it but if you only want to use it on your computer, it’s fine. It’s not supposed to work with Windows 10 but they lie, it does work, both on Win10 Home, (Huan’s PC), and Win10 Pro, my PC. It’s a piece of cake to use it and it provides a lot more than you see above. If you’re interested you need to download Picasa 3, it is still available on the internet. For me, it’s great software for not only editing your photographs but managing them too. Bonus, it’s free!

Both cooks were busy today, although I suppose only one was actually cooking. Huan took us to Italy for a Pepperoni pizza, very nice it was too. She makes a mean pizza! My job was just to put together a side salad to make sure we had our daily quota of vegetables. I make a mean salad! As always, too much was made, we’ll be having salad for lunch tomorrow and the leftover pizza has gone into the freezer to feed us another three times. I hasten to add that the “nouvelle cuisine” look was for the picture only; we did both eat a lot more than that!

June 18^th Once again the best laid plans of mice and men etc. I had forgotten it was Thursday and that Huan had singing this morning until she came into the office ready to go. In my head I planned where I would walk to get to the right place to meet her when she finished. This is where the plan went wrong. I kept nodding off at the computer and by the time I got out there wasn’t enough time left to carry out my plan. Yesterdays sandals were still recovering so I dug out the reserves from the bottom of the shoe rack. Walking towards the lift they didn’t feel quite right so I backtracked to the front door. Have you ever wondered what happens to footwear in a hot and humid climate? This is what I found.

Hurriedly I found something else to wear and I managed to meet Huan just as she was walking out of the choir practice compound. Our combined plan was next, go and visit the printer doctor to see if there was any news. There was. It wasn’t good. According to them a new print head was required, which I agreed with, some part that moves back and forth, perhaps that was right and a new mother board. How on earth was that damaged, I went nowhere near it. Anyway, the repair price was going to be over ¥3000.00 so we left it in the shop for them to do as they wished. I spent the rest of the day on the internet looking at printers and wondering when they all went up so much in price. Our old was the HP7610 and the replacement HP7612 costs a little more than the repair would have cost. I think I may have to set my sights a little lower!

June 19^th Is life eventually getting back to normal? Slowly it is. I mean it is quite normal for us to get the weather forecast wrong which we did again today. One day we will learn not to trust the computer. We were out fairly early this morning for a gentle, not too fast and not too far, walk. We did go a bit faster than this chap mind and he’s even got a “go faster” stripe!

How do you keep mice away from you sacks of food? Use cats of course, and this small shop has quite a few. There were four when we were there but the owner said there are quite a few more. I guess the older ones could be having a daytime snooze.

Just a few minutes later the rain came down, an hour and a half too early according to the forecast. I tried to take a photo of it today, not such an easy thing to do, at least not when the camera is always set to automatic.

Coming back via the open air market we heard a noise, neither of us were sure what it was or where it came from. It turned out to be a “muted” quack and it was coming from a small three wheeled farm vehicle where we spotted this fellow all by himself. Needless to say he wouldn’t come anywhere near me at all, he probably didn’t want to go the same way his siblings had already gone. We had a good chat though.

The rest of the day was spent trying to get online to FB, looking for recommendations about which replacement printer to buy and searching Taobao for perfection at minimal cost! Getting online was a proverbial pain in the posterior, it happens now and then. I did get some printer recommendations; they helped me in my Taobao search. I now probably have twenty bookmarks to go through with Huan.

June 20^th In the morning it was singing for Huan, fighting walls for me. I failed and had to revert to “Starsky & Hutch”. Still, it’s good to have a fall back. Of course I spent hours on Taobao trying to decide what printer to buy as well. I decided to buy a HP Smart Tank until I read the specifications on an English web site. They have a duty cycle of how many pages you can print every month but, and I didn’t realise this, they also have a minimum number of pages you should print. In this case it was 400 a month! For us it’s more like a dozen or so a week. Back to the drawing board.

Hours later, still stuck in the quagmire. It doesn’t help that model numbers are sometimes different in China to what they are in the west. Taobao can also be very frustrating although we would be lost without it. There are times when the description of the article bears no relation to what is advertised at the head of the page and of course some pages are old and now defunct. I’ll try again tomorrow.

June 21^st Huan was a little worried about the cost of a new printer and, if I’m honest, I suppose I was too. Last night I had a brainwave and looted the lottery winnings box. We have an ornament in the living room inscribed with the words “New House Fund” which is where I deposit our lottery winnings, such as they are. There was enough money in there, I took out ¥1600.00. The last time I raided this source was when I had to buy a new computer in 2018. Perhaps we should rename it “Replacement IT Fund”!

Anyway, that gave us an excuse to out, not that we really need one, but we that money now had to be deposited in what we call the Taobao bank. It’s an account in Huan’s name that we put money into for her phone and for our Taobao needs, separate to our other accounts. When you live in China, and especially in a smaller city like us, (only 140,000 people), you rely a lot on buying things online, which means mostly Taobao.

So off we toddled to the bank, via the nearby riverside where, to our amazement, we saw that they were doing some work related to the stays for the footbridge. I’m still not sure if there are additional cables to go up but the guys were busy on the tops today, one of them is even wearing a safety harness!

Like many places, we see rip-offs of Western logos but today I saw a rip-off of a rip-off. I did a double take when we walked passed the Pianoboy shop so had to take a picture of the Playboy shop as well so you could see both.

I had planned our timings so that we had to stop at the town square where I could have a nice bottle of cold coffee and a ciggie. Life is pretty much back to normal there, perhaps not as many children as usual but then again, it is Sunday morning.

Arriving home we spotted one of the insects that we’ve seen many times in the past and that we’ve showed you, usually on a tree outside our house. However, we’ve never seen one of them moving before. Today I took a video of one and lo and behold, a spider also joined the party.

After lunch, I narrowed my printer choices down to three, a Canon, an Epson and an HP, and then looked for some reviews on the ‘western’ internet. The Canon came out at #1, the Epson at #2 and the HP at #3 so the HP was off the list. I still fancied the Epson though, I preferred the fact it had push buttons and not a touch screen. Next it was Huan’s turn on Taobao; she has to ask the questions for me. “Does it have a network connection, an RJ45 socket?” I hear you ask “Why?” The answer is we like to be able to print off either computer. Their answer was “No”, that meant the Epson was binned. It was time to talk to the Canon man; the first question was the same. His answer was no too. This is where Taobao is not always as good as it should be. I asked Huan to ask him if he was sure and he said he was. I thought he was wrong so I went back on to the review website to confirm, where I found a picture of the rear of the printer showing the various connections including an RJ45. This picture I sent to Huan, she sent it to the store; all went quiet for a few minutes. Maybe he went to look in the box! Success, he came back with not only a verbal yes, but a list of specs that were not available on the store page. All my other questions, “Can we use photo paper”, “Does it have English” and “Does it have an English book” were answered positively so the order was made. We will soon receive a Canon 8520 All-in-one.

My purchase didn’t use all the money so the next thing I know Huan is looking at phones, well she does need a new one. Being her usual self I couldn’t convince to have any of the more well known brand names, you know, Huawei, Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo etc, instead she chose one that translates as “Small Chilli”! It’s only 4G, but we have no real need for 5G yet, it has 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, 8MP selfie camera, 16MP rear camera (4 lenses), all of which is way more than her present phone so it should suffice. It is certainly cheap enough, only ¥550.00, who knows, at that price I may go for one myself.

My day was finished off perfectly by a lovely long Skype call with #1 son. He and Amber seem to be coping fairly well with the problems of ‘lockdown’, both looked happy and healthy.

June 22^nd And Monday rolls round yet again in what seems record time, even faster than the week before. It’s all to with advancing years so it seems, I remember some scientist explaining it once. You can Google it if you want to know more. Today gave me an unexpected extra walk this week, Huan has a rehearsal for her upcoming show to be performed during the Dragon Boat Festival. You can learn more about that by following this link and even more by following the links within this link. Don’t say I never give you anything!

https://www.travelchinaguide.com/essential/holidays/dragon-boat.htm

The route I planned today took me past the ‘printer doctor’ first to give them the installation CD for the dead HP. “But it doesn’t work” they said to which I replied “Well I don’t need it anymore do I”. They took it anyway. Dog friends were next on my route but the first one, a Scotty I think, was very backwards in coming forwards today. Perhaps his Dad warned him off!

As for the rest of them, I didn’t find any of them at all; I do hope they’re not all sulking after my frequent absences recently. The riverside tea shops were all busy as I was walking back home, I often wonder if the people have no work to go to. Huan thinks they are mostly country folk who have been recompensed for their farms and lands and now have nothing else to do, the balance being made up of snowbirds.

The river itself was almost empty, for some reason they’ve drained it. Mind you, the locals were happy about that and I saw many of them with buckets in hand wading through the mud. At a rough guess they were looking for shells and/or crabs. Here are a couple of them, I’m not sure I would fancy wading though that mud!

Down at our end the water was still trying to escape, there was not enough to go over the dam so the only way out was through the inoperable sluice gates. Nice view though.

To finish off our week, Huan came home with a couple of photographs of her group, dressed as for the show sans make-up or hairdos. I think this stage is also the one they will be performing on and which I may have to attend as an audience member. Spot the enormous space for people to watch! To be able to watch you have to be there very early and then not leave your seat for three or more hours! What I need is to know what time Huan is on. With the way they normally organize things here I don’t hold out much hope for finding that out. Wish me luck!

And that’s it for now, see you again next week. Don’t forget to share with your friends, subscribe for email notifications or even to leave comments if you so wish. Bieeeeeee!